Would I Lie to You?

 Church in Wales bishops Joanna, Cherry (elect) and June                     Original source: BBC/Twitter

Readers may be familiar with the popular BBC comedy panel show Would I Lie to You? where contestants have to bluff about their deepest secrets while the opposing team have to find out which ones are true.

A massive bluff has been disclosed as a lie by one of the pioneers of 'gender theory'. He has admitted that he and his colleagues "basically just made it up". 

From the Coalition for Marriage:

"In an article in online magazine Quillette, former gender historian Christopher Dummitt explains how he and his fellow academics simply ignored the innate differences between men and women. In this way they 'proved' that 'sex was wholly a social construct'.

"What's worse, everyone was at it. 'Everyone was (and is) making it up. That's how the gender-studies field works', he confesses. Over the past 30 years, whole university departments have been taken over by subjects like 'gender history' and 'gender studies', which perpetuate the fiction that sex is not a 'biological reality'.

"Disagreeing with this nonsense is increasingly being regarded by our society as 'tantamount to hate speech'. It’s also being used to push all kinds of dangerous ideas to school children.

"The peer review process, far from providing a check on this groupthink, only made it worse. It was no better than a 'form of ideological in-group screening'.

"Dr Dummitt says that 'critics of the social constructionists are right to raise their eyebrows at the so-called proof presented by alleged experts'.

Parts of the Anglican Church were quick to pick up on the opportunity presented by gender theory to promote a non-biblical lifestyle as if somehow endorsed by references in the Bible to love, compressing its many forms into one. Their distortions have been used to accuse people who disagree with them as prejudiced homophobes and bigots simply for holding contrary opinions.

Despite constant claims of LGBT persecution in the Church, Archbishop Barry Morgan said way back in 2008: "There are a huge number of gay clergy and gay partnered clergy. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be bishops and they will be. We’re not arguing about if, we’re just arguing about when." He also said that he would be willing to consecrate Britain’s first openly gay bishop despite fears that such a move would further split the Anglican Communion.

Today there is a plethora of gender study courses even at some of the most prestigious universities. They are predominantly attended by women suggesting perhaps that either some women are more gullible or that they saw an opportunity to beat the Church into submission by making her more relevant to society.

The 'madness' began in the United States.

In his book The Crockford's File William Oddie wrote about the suicide of Dr Garry Bennett in December 1987 after he anonymously wrote the Preface to the 1987 Edition of Crockford's Clerical Directory: "The problems of modern Anglicanism are highlighted by the case of the Episcopal Church in the United States"(ECUSA).

Oddie writes
"Their intention was to make the Church more relevant to society's perceived needs so that more and more Americans would find those needs answered within the Episcopal Church.

"The Episcopal Church had been in decline for over 20 years. In 1968 ECUSA had 3,588,435 members. By 1989 this had dropped to 2,420,000. This decline had taken place against a steady increase in churchgoing in the American population as a whole, an increase which has been going on steadily since the1950s. During the same period, the classification of ECUSA by the Library of Congress in Washington has changed: it has now been demoted from the status of a 'denomination' to that of a 'sect'."

The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan
 with The Right Reverend Gene Robinson
 Photo: John Robertson. Source: Telegraph

 Gene Robinson was elected bishop coadjutor in 2003 then diocesan bishop, the first priest in an openly gay relationship to be consecrated a bishop in a major Christian denomination believing in the historic episcopate. This was followed in 2009 by the election of Mary Glasspool as a suffragan bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. She is an openly gay woman living with her partner.

Amazingly the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, adopted the ECUSA experiment as his model for advancing a programme of regularising homosexuality in the Church in Wales.

The retirement of Barry Morgan presented the ideal opportunity to right Morgan's wrongs. Instead the bench of bishops under their new archbishop, John Davies, chose "more of the same" - but faster.

The Dean of Salisbury addresses Gay Pride
 marchers. Source: Facebook

A seasoned LGBT campaigner the Dean of Salisbury, June Osborne, whose advance in the Church of England had, like other imports from England, come to an abrupt halt, was elevated to bishop of Llandaff . She joined another LGBT campaigner on the bench who had been fanfared as the first woman bishop in the Church in Wales, Joanna Penberthy. She had been appointed under  Barry Morgan's presidency in what many believe was the first of three episcopal stitch ups.

Osborne's influence led to the first transgender priest in Wales, since elevated to Canon of Llandaff Cathedral, presumably for her work in promoting transgenderism, followed recently by the appointment of the first bishop in a same sex relationship as bishop-elect of Monmouth.

Given the decline of ECUSA (now TEC), the slavish adherence of the Church in Wales and, indeed, of the Church of England, to the United States model remains a puzzle to orthodox, mainly cradle, Anglicans who have been abandoned by the liberal-minded new Anglicans.

The most charitable explanation is that gender studies motivated people to press for the Church to make a stand for the equality of women in the workplace. The consequences have been intolerance and exclusion despite promising that there would be no victimisation of those who in conscience could not accept the ordination of women and all the liberal theology that has followed it.

Many bishops would have you believe that gender studies (feminism, gender, politics and queer studies) make the church more relevant to society.

It's a lie!